The MiG (Mikoyan-Gurevich) Design Bureau: A Cold War Star Fading from the Sky

The chapter briefly reviews the rise of the Mikoyan-Gurevich (MiG) design bureau as a key aircraft designer for the Soviet military, from the time of WWII to the Cold War peaks of the bureau’s career and beyond. The appraisal of the bureau’s key contributions to Soviet air power is followed by a consideration of the drivers of Soviet arms—and specifically military aircraft—exports, examining the relation between geopolitics and economics as key inputs in the decision-making process concerning the sales and transfers involved. Subsequently, the chapter discusses the difficulties of MiG’s transition in the 1990s to having to function in a (more) market-determined environment, deprived of the state subsidies of old, before it was incorporated into the larger structures of the United Aircraft Corporation (UAC) and Rostec. Finally, the rivalry between the MiG and Sukhoi design bureaus is examined—confirming that MiG is fading from relevance under the new conditions, where the UAC’s interest in streamlining is inevitably a search for redundancies to dispose of. The consideration of the MiG–Sukhoi rivalry’s role in past Soviet and recent Russian military innovation may serve to illustrate how, in a domain where the strong role of the state is often taken for granted and seen as exempt of major contradictions, i.e., in the defense industrial sector of non-democratic states, the interest in state control, cost-efficiency, and innovation may present a hard-to-resolve trilemma. That is, given how innovation is limited once its key agents lack either subsidies, or autonomy, or both. MiG was never a non-state actor in any real sense, but it was forced to operate without major subsidies in the early 1990s, as it searched for opportunities to revive its good fortunes. Its recovery from this period, if it ever is to happen, is purely a function of the Russian state’s future defense investment decisions.